How To Change Windows Drive Icons Manually

1 month ago

Windows default drive icons look cool but seeing them regularly might become boring after a while. What if you could change Windows drive icons to the ones you like? Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing to do? After all who doesn’t like the change, right? That’s why we’ve come up with this guide which describes the easiest & manual way to change Windows drive icons and also shows screenshots/images for respective steps.

The benefit of changing icons is that – you get to assign your favorite icons to the individual drives (both internal and external) and that too without installing any third-party software or editing registry entries.

So let’s begin with the tutorial.

Note: This guide is tested and works with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. It may or may not work with Windows XP.

Change Windows Drive Icons

Step 1 – Firstly, open ‘Folder options’ from My Computer (or Computer if you are using Windows 8 or Windows 10).

Step 3 – Navigate to the drive whose icon you want to change. In the root directory of that drive, create a new text file and rename it to ‘autorun.inf’ (without quotes). Note that the file name should NOT look like ‘autorun.inf.txt’.

Step 5 – Move the downloaded icon file to the drive where we created autorun.inf file in step 3.

Step 6 – Now it’s time to assign the icon to drive. To do so, open autorun.inf and add the following code in it.

[autorun]
icon=xxxx.png

Replace xxxx with the name of the icon file.

Step 7 – This step is not that necessary but to observe icon change, immediately add this line after above 2 lines in autorun.inf file.

label=xxxx

Replace xxxx with any label name that you want to assign to the drive. The final code in autorun.inf should look like this –

[autorun]
icon=xxxx.png
label=xxxx

Save autorun.inf file.

Step 8 – Finally rename drive name to anything and you’ll immediately observe drive icon and label change. Now assign icons to other drives using the same procedure.

Optional Step – If you don’t want to see autorun.inf and icon file after opening the drive every time then you can hide them. For doing so, right-click on icon file, go to properties and check the ‘Hidden’ option. Do the same for autorun.inf. Also, you may now disable the ‘Hide extension for know file types’ option which we enabled earlier in Step 2.

That’s it! I hope by now your drive icons have been changed to whatever icons you wanted. If you have any query, comment it below so that we can sort it out. Peace!